Search results for: "Becoming"
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- Where to Look in the Present… Then, the quality of the intention and all its influences—the perceptions you have, the feelings you have, the things you pay attention to—will become clearer and clearer. So, if anything else comes up in the present moment—any outside sound, outside distraction, inside distraction, whatever—for the time being just let it pass, let it pass. You just want to stay right …
- Rewriting the Mind’s Song… Think them every day, every day, day after day, until that becomes the new normal for your mind. Because those attitudes of unlimited goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity are Brahma attitudes—the attitudes of a being on a very high level. And you would like to bring your mind up to that level. Otherwise, you’re on the human level, which has lots …
- Full Attention… What quality of breathing do you need? How long, how wide? How much do you want to push the breath into different parts of the body, and to what point does the pushing become counterproductive? Try to take each breath on its own terms. Remember that what you’re doing here is healing both for the body and for the mind. When your nerves …
- A Slave to the Dhamma… And who knows where they’re going to lead you? There’s no freedom, there’s no end to the defilements, unless you decide to put an end to them, in which case you have to become a slave to the Dharma. This is the kind of slavery where you can pay your way out of slavery by working hard enough. The work is …
- Karma Storms… There’s no place where you can trace back and say, “This person was the first to set things in motion,” or “This person was the first to respond in an excessive way.” When there’s no beginning point, the score becomes meaningless. That helps to depersonalize things. It takes a lot of the sting out of things that you’re thinking about. But …
- Your Intentions Come First… The more connected everything is, the less need you’ll feel for in-and-out breathing, and the stronger that sense of being One in the present moment becomes. The body is one large field of breath. That’s one meaning of “singleness of preoccupation.” And it’s what fills the mind. One of the terms for this is, “mindfulness immersed in the body …
- Sunrise, Sunset… If you don’t do anything about them now, they become hard to let go. And if you don’t let them go, they’re going to pull you down. So think about this every day as the sun rises. The sunrise may be beautiful, but it may be your last sunrise. You can’t hold on to it. The sunrise goes in a …
- Fear of Others… Fear becomes unskillful when it’s tied up in greed, aversion, and delusion. That’s the kind of fear you want to get past. The fear that comes from knowing that your mind has unskillful habits and the conditions could come about where those unskillful habits might take over: That’s something legitimately to be feared. You want to train your mind so that …
- At Ease with the Breath… Then, as you get more and more familiar with it, you begin to gain a sense of how the breath can become even more comfortable, even more congenial still. The more comfortable the breath, the easier it is to stay with it—as long as your mindfulness is sharp, your awareness is all around. Sometimes there’s a problem when the breath to gets …
- Jhana & Insight… You become really, really sensitive to little disturbances, like the princess who could detect the pea under many, many mattresses. Because the little things that can create suffering in the mind are like that: They’re very tiny, very small when they start out, but then they can grow. If you don’t detect them when they’re small, you’ve missed your chance …
- One Foot in the Present… The Buddha talks about bhava, these states of becoming, these little worlds we create in the mind. There’s a very strong sense of location to them. When you actually go into that world, that’s birth. Then you suffer from whatever the limitations that world might be. Your way of getting out of that location is to give yourself another location, i.e …
- Owners of Our Actions… That kind of habit then becomes something you can depend on. And even though we’re facing a lot of loss with the potential for illness, death, and separation, we have to remember that certain things are in our control. The body is not in our control. It is to some extent, but in a lot of areas you can’t tell it what …
- Stop & Think… you realize that you want to go beyond even the formless states—in other words, to total release—then the issues of the world will begin to fade, and your task becomes clear: You’ve got to get the mind to settle down so that you can see its processes clearly and you can see where the craving is coming from, the craving that …
- One Hand Clapping… That’s when they become one. But up until that point, you’ll be following one or another of them. But as long as you’re following them in terms of how they’re related, that’s okay. As for any other thoughts that come up, you don’t have to make any comments on them. Just leave them be. Some people get discouraged …
- The Languages of the Mind… In this way, the habit we have of forming concepts—what the Buddha calls directed thought and evaluation, which are verbal saṅkhāras—instead of being the problem, actually become part of the solution. When you find the mind wandering off, chattering about other things, just realize that those other things are not the issue right now. It’s not that you’ll never be …
- Your Inner Coach… So that kind of view places an obstacle on your becoming a good person, learning how to act well, speak well, think well. So it only makes sense to take the opposite view, that you do have choices, that they do make a difference, that you can learn how to develop skillful qualities. That’s one test. Another test, he said, was around the …
- Testing Karma… You’re not becoming control freak where you force an impossible idea on things. People who have genuine control are the ones who’ve mastered the principle of cause and effect and have seen how you can effectively have an impact on events in a way that doesn’t require that you’re constantly stressed out over them. So to what extent can you …
- Customs of the Noble Ones… When you do this, the meditation becomes *your *meditation and not necessarily Ajaan Lee’s meditation. As long as it’s getting results, that’s what matters. Ajaan Maha Boowa made that comment in one of his Dhamma talks, saying, “Even though there may be things that the Buddha didn’t say, but if you try them out and they get good results, they …
- Right Exertion at Play… If you do them with knowledge, though, they become part of the path. So, as you occupy the mind with developing good qualities, you’re not just giving it busy work. You’re allowing it to be entertained and at the same time educated about what’s going on in the mind: how things are put together, how things can be taken apart, and …
- Customs of the Noble Ones… So if you want to become a noble person, you have to follow the customs of the noble ones. Take their standards as your standards. And there are basically four. The first three start out with contentment with things outside: food, clothing, and shelter. You learn to be content with what you’ve got, and you’re careful not to get proud of the …
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